MeRT

I have a network share that gets backups sent to it automatically, so I want to have the network drive automatically mounted on bootup, so the backups will work. You’ll need to make sure you have smbfs installed and then open fstab and edit it.

sudo apt-get install smbfs
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add the following to the fstab

# My Network Drives
//192.168.0.11/media /media/media cifs credentials=/home/michael/.mediaserverCredentials,rw,iocharset=utf8,_netdev,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

• _netdev is supposed to make it not try to mount the drive until the network is up and going.
• credentials is where your access credentials are stored
• cifs is the samba file system type
• uid is the user id, exclude for root
• guid is the group id

You will need to create your .mediaserverCredentials

sudo gedit /home/michael/.mediaserverCredentials

and add the following to it.

username=michael
password=PASSWORD

obviously you will need to put your username and password, and change the paths to something for you. You may want to use /etc/samba/ as a location to store the credentials file. You need to make sure that the file is owned by root, and only readable to root.

sudo chown root:root /home/michael/.mediaserverCredentials
sudo chmod 400 /home/michael/.mediaserverCredentials

I’ve seen it mentioned places to update the unmount order to prevent hanging during shutdown. I’m not sure if this is necessary or not.

sudo update-rc.d -f umountnfs.sh remove
sudo update-rc.d umountnfs.sh stop 15 0 6 .

I wanted to be able to automatically mount my drives by adding them to fstab. I have done it before, but I have used the /dev/sdb1 syntax. I have noticed a problem when I unplug the drives, and plug them back into a different SATA controller. When I do that it changes the /dev/sd## to something else. I have learned that if you use the UUID in the fstab, then this issue doesn’t really arise.

First off is to determine the UUID of the drives that you have mounted. Enter the following in the command line.

sudo blkid

It will return something like

/dev/sda1: UUID="6413b21e-ec40-4d80-8103-da8ea5fbbd30" TYPE="ext4" 
/dev/sdd1: UUID="08ae0157-7718-4e3d-be15-11a3b2802148" TYPE="ext3" 
/dev/sdd5: UUID="e580e4fe-4aed-4ea9-bcac-8ab9220414db" TYPE="swap" 
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="Seagate320" UUID="ce09b320-c7b3-4d7c-a192-a2d55208473c" TYPE="ext3"

You can also run “sudo fdisk -l” if you want more information about the different /dev/sd## drives. Otherwise if you can tell from the results which UUID you want then theres no need for “sudo fdisk -l”. The drive I am going to add to fstab is the “Seagate320” drive.

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add the following to the fstab file

# My Local Drives
UUID=ce09b320-c7b3-4d7c-a192-a2d55208473c /media/Seagate320/ ext3    defaults,errors=remount-ro 0       1

Next time you reboot the drive will automatically be mounted.